T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

She was having a martini, three olives on the side. That was her trick: olives on the side so you get more gin, a matter of displacement — or lack of it, that is. She took a long slow sip, watching him. “That’s the idea,” she said. “Eventually. When things are, I don’t know, more stable over there.”

“Right,” he said, and he felt his spirits crank back up and it had nothing to do with the Xanax, or did it? “Because they’d just eat them now, right? Probably the minute they got off the boat.” The mountain zebra was almost gone in its native range, he knew that much, and the Grevy’s too. The kudu weren’t doing all that much better.

“ Stable, ” she repeated bitterly, sweeping her hair back. “It’s a joke over there. Places like Sudan or Somalia, even Kenya. Everything’s guns. Tribes. Guerrillas.” She paused to back up and give it an exaggerated Spanish pronunciation: “ Gare-ee-yas, I mean. Not gorillas — gorillas we could use more of. A whole lot more. But that’s the mentality over there — shoot everything that moves.”

“Over here too,” he said.

She was silent a moment. Then she said, “What are you thinking of having?”

“Me? Fish. What about you?”

That was when he glanced out the window to the street below and saw Adam climbing out of an unfamiliar car that had just pulled up to the curb — a Japanese thing, pale blue, that suddenly became familiar, because here was that woman, what was her name, emerging from the driver’s side to join him on the sidewalk. From this angle — he was right above them — he saw only the crowns of their heads and the flat plateaus of their shoulders, Adam’s head shaved to the bone and glowing in the light trapped beneath the fog. The woman — her name came to him then, Sara — wore her hair parted down the middle, a crisp white line there as if her skull had been divided in two. They seemed to confer a moment and then started across the street to the pizza place and the bar there, Adam in the camo outfit he seemed to wear perennially now and Sara in jeans, boots and a low-cut top that displayed the deep crease between her breasts, bird’s-eye view.

“Isn’t that Adam?” Carolee said.

“Yeah, he just got out of the car there.”

“Who’s that with him?”

“Sara. The woman I told you about — from the other day?”

A silence. The restaurant buzzed around them. They watched the two of them cross the street, mount the curb and disappear into the pizza place — the pub that sold pizza, that is — Adam hunching in ahead of her, no thought of standing aside or holding the door, but that was only typical, that was only to be expected, that was Adam.

“She’s old for him, isn’t she? She’s got to be forty.”

“That’s his business.”

“I mean, what’s she even doing with him?” She was leaning to her left, at the very edge of the table, squinting to peer out the window, though there was nothing to see but the closed door and above it the neon sign doing battle with the fog. “She’s a piece of work herself, is what I hear.”

He just shrugged, took a sip of his martini. He’d given up worrying about Adam a long time ago — or at least he’d tried to. Adam had problems. He’d always had problems. There’d been shrinks, a whole succession of them, but once he turned eighteen they had no control over that, and even after the last time he’d been arrested and evaluated by a state-appointed psychiatrist they still couldn’t get access to the records. Privacy laws. He was an adult. Living in his own world. And while that world had its intersections with theirs and they did what they could — helped him with money, gave him a place to live where he could have some privacy and do his thing, whatever that might be, putting up walls, obsessing over the Chinese, calling himself Colter — he kept pushing them away till there was no point in it anymore.

“Cindy Burnside says she’s got some pretty strange theories; I mean, really out there — as in right wing? As in conspiracies? Anti-everything? You know she got arrested for refusing to show a cop her license and registration?”

“She’s fine,” he said. “He’s fine too.”

“Fine? Where’s he going to live when we close on my mother’s house? With her?”

He didn’t have a chance to answer because the waiter suddenly appeared with two fresh drinks, two more martinis, which would put them both over their self-imposed limit, if they were going to drink wine with dinner, that is — and they were. But there was the tray, there the perspiring glasses, there the waiter, smiling. “We didn’t order those,” Sten said.

The waiter — fiftyish, in white shirt and tie, his hair slicked tight to his skull — gestured to the couple sitting two tables over. They smiled, waved. Did he know them? “Compliments of the gentleman and lady,” the waiter said.

“I don’t want another martini,” Sten said. “I’m not even half-finished with this one—”

“They want to buy you a round,” the waiter said.

He wanted to say For what? Why? I don’t even know them, but they were already raising their glasses to him and here was the man giving him the thumbs-up and then the peace sign — or maybe it was the V -for-victory sign — and he said, “Yeah, sure, okay,” and in the next moment he was raising his glass in return.

“That was nice,” Carolee said.

“Real nice,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

She must not have caught it because the next thing she said was, “The sturgeon sounds good,” and then, in non sequitur, “I thought Adam wasn’t supposed to go in there? Piero’s, I mean.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

“They don’t eighty-six you for life?”

He stared into the fresh martini — and he wasn’t going to rush even if it was getting warm before his eyes because he wouldn’t have strangers dictating his life to him — before he looked up and said, “If every time somebody got a little rowdy they eighty-sixed you for life all the bars in the world would be out of business.”

“A little rowdy?” And here was that look again, the one that bunched her eyebrows. “I’d say he was more than a little rowdy — and what did that wind up costing us?”

He felt the irritation come up in him, despite the Xanax, despite the gin and the whiff of vermouth riding atop it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

THE NEXT MORNING, EARLY, he found himself back in Fort Bragg, at the grocery there — the cheap one, the one the tourists didn’t know about — pushing a cart and working his way through the itemized list Carolee had pressed on him as he went out the door. The place was over-lit, antiseptic, as artificial as the flight deck of a spaceship, and at this hour there were more shelf-stockers than shoppers. That was all right. He liked the early hours, when things were less complicated. He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate, and he supposed he could thank his mother for that. And his father. The work ethic — once you had it, once it had been implanted in you, how could you shake it? Why would you want to? Relax, he kept telling himself. Keep busy. Relax. Keep busy. The last thing he wanted was to wind up sitting in a recliner all day staring at the TV like some zombie or pulling on a sun visor to chase a golf ball around the fairways with a bunch of loudmouthed jocks. Or bridge. He hated bridge, hated games of any kind. But how did you relax? That was the problem he was trying to resolve — and certainly world-class indulgence wasn’t the answer.